USB 3.0 External HyperX SSD

With data libraries constantly expanding with a collection of apps, photos, and videos backing up your data or just moving around large files has become a time-consuming daily endeavour. This is largely due to the fact that USB 2.0 has been a performance bottleneck for some time now, and alternatives like eSATA and FireWire never really caught on with the public. Thankfully, with its backwards compatibility and huge performance improvement, USB 3.0 has become the 'it' technology this year. Yet surprisingly there has been a distinct lack of interesting USB 3.0 storage devices. We have seen a few USB 3.0 HDD enclosures hit the retail market, but those still rely on traditional hard drives which can't really demonstrate the full potential of the SuperSpeed 5GBps USB 3.0 interface. This is where external solid state drives (SSDs) come into play.

Click on image to enlarge

Joining the likes of OCZ with the Enyo, Kingston have just introduced the USB 3.0 HyperX SSD, an external USB 3.0 solid state drive that comes in a sleek blue enclosure and that will be available in 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB capacities.

Size-wise this product appeared a little smaller than most of the newest 2.5" hard drive enclosures that we've seen from likes of Seagate and Western Digital. Although the concept enclosure that we were presented featured a hybrid metal and plastic design, the retail version will likely be all aluminium.

Performance: USB 3.0 on the left, USB 2.0 on the right - Click on image to enlarge

Despite our best attempts, we couldn't get Kingston to reveal the source manufacturer for the controller or the NAND flash chips, but we did get some transfer rate figures. Currently, Kingston are listing the drive's performance as 195MB/sec sequential read and 160MB/sec sequential write. No word yet on access time, but that obviously be way under 1 millisecond. Naturally, the HyperX SSD is also backwards compatible with USB 2.0, and in case you didn't know, you can get up to 42MB/sec by plugging a USB 3.0 device into a traditional USB 2.0 port.

No word yet on pricing, but since the estimated launch date is August 2010, you have a few months to start saving up your pennies. I think it will be worth it!

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